NICE!

Another good post from swaaye. 😀

I have a Diamond Riva 128. It's a reasonably common card, and so I guess it was quite popular/successful back in the day. But this specific card has a PCB revision letter of "G". (Most seem to be "D" or alphabetically less.) It's also got a small golden/orange heatsink on the main chip. However I'm not sure if that was added by a previous owner.

I've moved all my retro nik naks from the stove hot (summer months) attic to the garage. Sometime this year, I'm going to retest everything. As I plough through everything again (in order to make sure I've got all the correct drivers, software, manuals, BIOSes, etc) when I spot it, I'll take a photo of it and add it to this thread.

You have a Diamond Viper V330. Popular, indeed. I have a STB Velocity 128 which was used in lots of Gateway 2000 systems among others.

I've seen them come bare chip and with pathetic little u-shaped IC "heatsinks". It's possible that later boards got better heatsinks because this was when heat output started to become worthy of a heatsink and they may have run into problems with going cheap and no heatsinks.

Stole some pics from the web. 😁

Article covering RIVA 128 cards, from old issue of Computer Gaming World. (from my magazine thread)

i got a STB Velocity 128 PCI last week
also have a heatsink that normally used for voltage transformers and a wire on the back

why i see only links and not the pictures like on the post from swaaye?
oh and its NV3

It might have to do with the file extension being in caps? Or something funky about your JPEGs themselves. I had this problem with the brochure pics so just used Imageshack.

could it be that he exxe has added an attatchment and not uploaded his images to a hosting website

It's probably the caps thing (.JPG instead of .jpg).

Hmmm. Nothing in the Marketing brochure about the atrocious blurry video quality. 😮

Some sort of horrid quality overlay scaling?

No, the RAMDAC on any RIVA 128 board I've ever seen was very bad. Fuzzy text, etc.

Mine isn't particularly fuzzy.... STB Velocity 128. Sounds like NV cards were varying in output quality back then too then.

I thought it was pretty good. When I switched it out for the Verite V1000 then things got fuzzy. Yuck.

Which reminds me... I have two Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 cards. They are basically identical but one isn't quite as sharp. So I suppose this is something that varies more than one might imagine.

valnar wrote:

No, the RAMDAC on any RIVA 128 board I've ever seen was very bad. Fuzzy text, etc.

I can't reproduce this either with one of my Riva128 based cards.
Only if I push the DAC to its maximum at 1600x1200@85 Hz it gets slightly blurry around the pixels. But this can also be partial related to the signal circuity in the CRT.

I have an ASUS and an ELSA Riva128 cards, none have blurry/fuzzy picture quality...

I have a Diamond Viper V330 PCI, Riva128. Output is very clear on mine.
My Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro is blurrier, compared to the Riva.

unmei220 wrote:

I have a Diamond Viper V330 PCI, Riva128. Output is very clear on mine.

Same here. I have a few of these cards. I notice that there are quite a few revisions. For example, one of them is a revision G. Maybe some early versions were blurry?

swaaye wrote:

Stole some pics from the web. 😁

I have this Viper V330 here somewhere, guess I need more watermarks in my pictures 😉.
AFAIK the first S3 Virges (no DX) were quite blurry.

elianda wrote:

AFAIK the first S3 Virges (no DX) were quite blurry.

STB manufactured S3 Virge (325 chipset) video card = good general image quality. 😀

Mine is revision B and if I have to say something, is one of the most crispier cards I have.
Very good quality output.